We are a western world divided

The post last evening about the opening ceremony and the sudden about-face of the media readers needs a follow up in the light of comments made, such as: “How inspiring a message for the young. I await the closing ceremony with eager anticipation.”

That’s the same young who are uneducated, with qualifications on paper yet few job prospects, is it?

Many people made the point that these games and that opening ceremony in particular were heavily political and more than that, were divided directly along those political lines which have our country heavily split. And not just our country. There is the feeling, expressed by the “other viewpoint” that I “must have been watching a different ceremony” or even “a different games”.

Well yes – I have, we have, you have. If you think it was all so wonderful, then please reflect on the comments in posts passim and now these, which I’ve just gone round the blogrolls and extracted. They include mainly Brits but also Americans and though mainly male, there are women in there:

# 27 million of us are supposed to have watched it but that did not include me nor any of the seven people I asked on Saturday and Sunday.

# I didn’t watch it but then I never do watch the Olympics so nothing unusual there. I heard that CND and the NHS were included and I would have to agree that that was excessively political.

# I am an Olympics pooper. I have no interest in the Olympics, I don’t care who wins what or how they win it. To me it’s just a very expensive series of TV shows with live audiences. I’m not anti-sport – I like sport, but I don’t like the glitz, celebrity worship, drugs, deceit, corruption and shameless manipulation of the global sporting industry.

# I am an Olympics pooper. I have no interest in the Olympics, I don’t care who wins what or how they win it. To me it’s just a very expensive series of TV shows with live audiences. I’m not anti-sport – I like sport, but I don’t like the glitz, celebrity worship, drugs, deceit, corruption and shameless manipulation of the global sporting industry.

I don’t like the way politicians with shiny shoes embarrass us by climbing laboriously onto the bandwagon. I don’t like the circus atmosphere, the whipping up of emotions, the childish antics of winners, the pitiful tears of losers, the endless banal interviews with dull sporting fanatics.

# I don’t care about the Olympics. Except insofar as I wish Paris had won the bid. They would then be saddled with this financial and security monstrosity which will exclude all other news for the next few weeks and is always relentlessly upbeat. Indeed, I read a rather amusing comment somewhere suggesting that hosting the Olympics is not so much like being the Queen at a garden party at the Palace and more like John Hurt in ‘Alien’

# The UK can at least console itself with the knowledge that, even before the sport gets underway, we are certain to win at least one Gold medal at London 2012 – in how to enact a quasi-facist state in order to protect corporate sponsors on a money-spinning brouhaha using income stolen from the tax paying public. Silver and Bronze medals won’t, of course, be awarded.

# Although it makes no difference to the sporting outcome, there is something deeply displeasing about those empty chairs, testifying as they do to the relative values that see the paying public relegated to a literal back seat while the Olympic Family manifest their indifference by leaving their prime places unfilled.

# So enjoy the sport and the competition by all means. You are paying through the nose to fund it all, just as you have all the other scams and pickpocket goings on. All I ask is don;t lose sight of the unpleasantness that is ever present, where vast sums are to be filched by those trained to see an opportunity and exposed, trusting pocket.

# Love the show, troubled by the message

# I absolutely loathe the Olympics. It’s a corrupt, fraudulent and grotesque celebration of globalism. The idea that Hitler and the Chinese Communists were perfectly acceptable to “the values and ideas of the Olympic movement” but free speech and democracy are not should tell you all that you need to know about the true spirit of the Olympics.

The first comment there was quite indicative.

Those happily living in the PC world of unfairness and intolerance masquerading as fairness and tolerance would have adored the ceremony, adored the political message.

And “the other view” retorts: “Must you always bring politics into it?”

The answer is: “No, we do not bring politics into it. They’re brought in by others who then turn around and pretend that no politics have been brought into it. Please see the quoted comments above.”

You see, it’s not just me. There are many people saying roughly the same thing. Now surely even the “other view” must realize that their “all in together, we’re all the 99%” falls on deaf ears when we look around and see how this country and others have been brought to ruin by a particular political ideology and that ideology is alive and sick in the Olympics, in particular the opening ceremony, technically stunning though it was.

So while one side obliviously laps up the truly weird ceremony, not seeing for one second what it was really about, the other two-thirds of the country doesn’t buy it and 1. didn’t even bother watching or 2. watched and sighed. The parts I’ve now seen simply reinforce that.

We could argue about the ceremony itself till the cows come home but what we can’t argue about is the political divide and that is mortifying. This country is deeply divided whereas once it was largely, on the main issues, on the same page.

Firstly, there are the Statists who think everything’s fine, that the EU is the best bet, that discrimination is fine against people as long as the cause is just and ask: “Why can’t we all just be one big happy family, all agreeing with one another, slouching towards the new serfdom?”

The other side, us, comes over as really rather curmudgeonly and no fun to be with, we’re deeply unhappy about everything from education to the courts to the NHS to the EU, to feminism, to PCism, to every corrupt move made by big, out-of-control government and the hegemony of PPI corporatism.

Having happily gone along with the people being shafted, the “other view” then turns around – and this is the bit which is hard to stick – and says: “Oh you’re so divisive.”

At which point we tear our hair out and jump off Beachy Head, thus leaving the happy survivors to enjoy their State-defined utopia of “fairness and tolerance” until it’s perfectly obvious they’ve in fact bought State-directed serfdom. By this stage, just as in the USSR, there are no free-thinkers left and no one of vision to lead people out of the mire.

So yes – we have been watching an entirely different Olympics and we see the opening ceremony as heavily political, just furthering the agenda they have planned for us all. And we look over at our fellow men and women of “the other view” who are totally oblivious to anything wrong in the society, who can see no connection whatever with what went on that night and the wider developments in the nation … and we can but sigh.

We are so far divided in this country that we don’t even read the same books, follow the same blogs. We’re not even on the same page. We use different language, different words for the same things. This blog here is one of the few political blogs which has people of both sides coming to it [apart from trolls of course] and when it gets political, as it is now, the “other view” is mystified, shaking its head and thinking, to paraphrase a comment on the last post, that we “must be smoking some real good weed.”

Actually, we’re trying to get people to wake up and see what is going down here. Clearly we’re not succeeding.

8 Responses to “We are a western world divided”

Oh dear.. you seriously think quoting an “I didn’t watch it.. but heard” is going to seem like expert opinion? Or someone else who admitted to not watching it and that one or two of their like minded friends didn’t either..

are you joking? Please tell me you are. Looks like a collection of random mithering, som maybe making a point some not at all. Might as well find a quote saying “Well I hate broccoli, and I think Woody Allen is too influenced by European “art” movies” (neither opinions endorsed by me ^_^).

I do agree about the empty seats.

Sometimes tho I just think you are determined to put people who might side with you a lot more than they do on the opposite team with your straightjacketing hobby horses and such.

I did watch it, Moggsy – Cherie gave the link – and it was every bit as bad as the majority were saying. Please see the quotes above in the post and not just my words.

Perhaps, just maybe, is it at all possible – that all is not well? Perhaps, just maybe, this attempt to turn it onto me, the same old tired tactic, is not so and that others are saying exactly the same things. In fact, the majority in the land are saying these things.

The Slog is a highly respected and much visited blog in the sphere. It’s on many people’s blogrolls and has large traffic. Here is his take:

Britain stays within a tradition begun by Adolf Hitler and cemented by the Beijing fascists. Politicisation added to the shameless commercialisation of the Games

The cauldron lighting element was brilliant and original and didn’t succumb to the temptation to go bigger and higher. Two other things stood out for me which I haven’t seen commented upon anywhere else.

The so called tribute to the victims of 7/7 was a disgrace, devoid of dignity and respect.

Secondly, I think the grand theme has been missed by most people lost in the miasma of jump-cut, multi audio channel direction, flashing lights and fireworks. After stripping the peripherals away we are left with the story of a country and a people transformed within a few hundred years from being rural, stolid and hardy to urban, shallow and effete. Mediocrity celebrating mediocrity.

Witness and compare the parade of teams with those of earlier games. It used to be a formal affair with teams parading not in military step but at least as a team with discipline dictated by their rigorous preparation for the events to come. Japes and fun and games were reserved for the ‘after show party’ of the closing ceremony. On Friday night the more Westernised the nation the more the team behaved like a group of teenagers on a Saturday night drinking binge.

Many on the left saw what they wanted to see – a celebration of the common man. I saw a cruel mocking of the victim.

James I din’t suggest you didn’t watch it. Unless it was you who said “I am an Olympics pooper. I have no interest in the Olympics, I don’t care who wins what or how they win it. To me it’s just …” I had thought you were quoting other people who had no knowlege of it saying just that for some weird reason.

No I don’t think all is rosey as you well know, but I do say people are way to keen to see almost anything as “evidence” for whatever.

The greeks kept slaves didn’t they, does not invalidate democracy.. or do you say it does?

I ‘m not sure you caught the irony, or was it sarcasm, in that point, which I made about a convicted doper winning the cycling race, which I did not find at all inspiring for the young or anyone else. My fault perhaps, for flipping between genuine comment and ironic sarcasm. I know what I meant at least. I’ll spell it out better next time.